Are your supplements Dead or Alive?
Are your supplements Dead or Alive? Last month, I wrote a blog describing how with regards to supplements, absorption means nothing if it is not accompanied with proper utilization. Remember, even mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, formaldehyde can and will absorb into the system; however, will our bodies receive any benefit from what is being absorbed and be able to effectively utilize that which was absorbed.
With relation to utilization, the best way to ensure that our bodies will be able to utilize nutrients in our supplements, is to make sure that the supplements are not dead, but living. You ever notice the difference in how you feel when you ingest a bunch of fried foods or overcooked foods vs. how you feel when you eat fresh, raw living fruits and vegetables? When we ingest living foods, we feel refreshed, we feel renewed. When we eat a heavy meal of fried or overcooked foods, we become sluggish, our energy levels start to drain. This is a result of the living energy within foods, the living water, the living structured nutrients. Vitamins and minerals found within fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, legumes etc. are in a living complex structure. The nutrients are in a biological complex bound to proteins, fatty acids, enzymes, lipids, carbohydrates. Upon digestion, these biological complexes go to work, providing signals that are received by our bodies, and our bodies then relay that message to the brain and back within our bio-chemistry, enabling our bodies to properly direct and to deal with these ingested nutrients.
One of the most important discoveries and revelations in nutrition occurred in 1999, when Gunter Blobel won the nobel prize in physiology. Have you ever wondered exactly how our bodies know how and where to deliver vitamins and minerals? Well, this is exactly what Gunter Blobel discovered and received the Nobel Prize for. In his discovery, he noted that “Proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization within the cells.” In simpler terms, I like to use the analogy of a taxi driver. The proteins attached to vitamins and minerals in our foods are the taxi driver within our bodies, using these “intrinsic signals”, sort of like directions or a GPS system, these proteins have directions, and they not only deliver these vitamins and minerals to the appropriate destinations within our bodies, but these proteins also have the ability to enter the cells for proper delivery of these nutrients. Therefore, if you take away these proteins or protein structures (branched-chain amino acids), you are left with a directionless, lifeless vitamin and/or mineral. So, back to utilization, we can determine that without protein-bound structures, isolated and/or chelated supplements are void of life, void of direction, void of the opportunity to be effectively utilized.
When we determine what exactly the differences are between wholefood supplements vs. isolated mineral salts and/or synthetic chelated minerals or synthetic vitamins; we can categorize the wholefood supplements as living or dormant (becomes activated upon digestion), and we can label isolated mineral salts as dead, or void of any living biological complex structure.
So, the next time you hear someone argue how well a supplement is absorbed, determine whether that supplement is living or if it is dead. We are what we eat, and since we are living ourselves, we should feed upon living structured nutrients, and avoid the dead supplements. These isolated and/or chelated supplements have never appeared in any living cell structure and never have, nor never will be treated in our bodies the same way the wholefood structured nutrients are treated and received within the body.
